The table below compares earnings at age 29 of female graduates compared to non graduates for different subject areas.

As you can see, female economics graduates earn 150% more than non graduates, with medicine not far behind and most of the rest of the STEM subject graduates earning 100% more.

Meanwhile at the other end of the scale social care and create arts degree graduates only earn about 20-25% more than non-graduates, making these degrees a lot less valuable in terms of purely financial returns.

The significance of these statistics

Fair enough I guess that medicine yields a decent return, I don’t think there’s much scope to criticise that, and given the innovation within science and engineering, the fact that these degrees result in 100% higher earnings at age 29 isn’t surprising either.

HOWEVER, I have a problem with economics graduates earning so much more. It’s very unlikely that these people are earning so much money because of the social good they are doing. It’s probably more likely that they’re sucking money upwards to the already rich working for corporations and hedge funds, or doing crude econometric (read ‘guess work’) analysis for large institutions like the World Bank. They’re reward is probably making the rich richer, or at least keeping them rich.

Meanwhile down at the bottom, I’m not so sure whether the low return on the caring degrees shows how little we value this qualitative side of life, rather than the fact that degrees in such subjects maybe can’t teach you that much?!? I mean with caring, how much is there that you can’t learn on the job, honestly, or just learn at level 3.

Don’t get me wrong though, I think caring professions are very much underpaid.

As to creative arts… I’m not sure whether these are undervalued, difficult for me to say with any level of objectivity, although if these stats are anything to go by, it shows us that ‘society’ doesn’t value art very highly!

NB – The figures for men are a little different, check out the above study if yer interested!

The significance of these statistics

This is YET MORE evidence of how private schools seem to play a crucial role in the reproduction of class inequality. The chain seems to be:

Go to a private school and get hot-housed

Get into a Russel Group university

Get a better paid job.

It also shows that we need to keep researching exactly how private schools confer advantages on children from rich backgrounds and on just exactly how material and cultural capital combine to get these kids better jobs as adults.

Limitations with these statistics

The above stats show all earners, including those who failed their GCSEs, so we’re not really comparing like with like when we compare highest and lowest SES categories, because so many people from the lowest SES category fail to get 5 A*-C grades at GCSE, which means they are much less likely to go to HE, which has a significant negative impact on their earnings at age 29.

With these stats we are going back to a cohort which sat their GCSEs over 10 years ago, so they are already dated, although in fairness, this is unavoidable with a longitudinal analysis such as this.

*Given that only 7% of UK children go to private school, and that most have to pay fees, attendance at private school strongly suggests that this is the top tenth decile of students by ‘social class’ background, so the top half of the top fifth.

At age 29 male graduates earn £13K more per year than those with 5*-Cs without a degree while women earn £10K per annum more.

Look at another way, this means that a degree should pay for itself after just four years if you’re a woman, and three years if your a man…

I calculated these figures based on research into the impact of degrees on future earnings at the age of 29 conducted by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

If you look at the wages earned by HE graduates compared to people who got 5 A*-Cs at age 29, then female HE graduates earn £10K more per year before tax, while men earn £13K more per year, again after tax.

If we reduce this difference a little to take account of taxation, then we get the figures above: a degree pays back in earnings after just 3 years for men and 4 years for women, at least once they reach the age of 29.

All of this assumes tuition fess are £9K a year for 3 years, and doesn’t take into account the opportunity cost of HE students not having earned anywhere near as much for 3 years while studying compared to non HE students.

Having said that, I think it’s fair enough to take a long term view, and look at things 6-7 years or so after graduating… a degree is a long term investment after all.

My tax calculations are also approximate.

NB – the above figures are averages, and there are considerable variations on this depending on the subject you choose to study, and other factors such as your class background. For more info on the study, you might also like this post!

U.K. universities typically charge £9250 year for most Higher Education degree courses, which means a total cost of £27 750 for a standard, three year degree. But is it worth it?

This post summarises the findings of a recent quantitative study conduct by the Department for Education and the Institute for Fiscal studies which examines the impact of having a degree on early career salaries (up until 29 years old), taking into account a whole range of background factors such as prior attainment at GCSE, social class background, and gender as well as the type of university and subject studied.

What is the impact of going to university on future earnings?

Overall, at age 29 the average woman who attended HE earns > 50% more than the average woman (with five A*-C GCSEs) who did not.

For men the gap is 25%, which is still significant.

Class background and prior attainment still explain more than HALF the difference

HOWEVER, a lot of the above difference in future earnings is explained by differences prior to university – and once we take into account higher prior attainment and class background,

There’s actually quite a difference here between men and women – female graduates earn 28% more than non-graduates, while male graduates earn only 8% more. So class background seems to affect men more than women?!? It sees that factors such as cultural capital may still matter!

Russel Group graduates do a lot better!

The type of institution has a large affect on future salary gains – those attending Russel Group universities can look forward to much higher salaries compared to those attending post 1992 institutions.

Overall, significant salary gains are enjoyed by 85% of students (99% of women, 67% of men)

Subject studied matters!

Future incomes vary greatly by subject studied. Men studying creative arts, English or philosophy actually end up with lower earnings on average at age 29 than those who did not go to university. However, studying medicine or economics increases male earnings by more than 20%.

For women, there are no subjects that have negative returns, and studying economics/ medicine increases their earnings age 29 by around 60%.

Final thoughts

Looked at from a purely financial perspective, in 2018 it still makes financial sense for most people to do a degree, but some gain more out their degrees than others.

But there are some quite complex correlations between future earnings, subject studied, gender, and so on, and the final two graphics above do an excellent job of showing how these variables interact.

Based purely on the stats, if you’re a lad with ‘low GCSE’ attainment going to a bottom-end university, it’s probably not worth you doing a degree.

For most other graduates, earning 20% more, that’s £6K extra on a £30K salary, roughly, so after tax, your degree would have more or less paid for itself by your late 20s, early 30s. Sooner, if you’re doing economics or medicine!

Having said that, there are other benefits to going to university besides widening your job prospects and improving your future salary – such as the knowledge, the friends and the lolz, and of course these might well be priceless.

And Very Finally a word of the advice for the uncertain….

If you’re not sure whether you should do a degree or not, or if you’re uncertain about what subject you should do, don’t let your parents or your college pressurise you into applying to university NOW. You can always apply with a ‘gap year’, or just not apply and apply next year or the year after… starting on the wrong course and dropping out is a very expensive (£9.25K) mistake to make, and you’ll probably gain little from it other than stress.

So if you’re uncertain, just chilax, even if the people around you are going mental at you about applying. I took a year out after my A-levels, and had a great time being unemployed and reading philosophy before applying for my degree in American Studies and Anthropology – two great subjects I never would have applied for while at school.

This post was written for educational purposes. And the above advice does not actually constitute advice, ask a so called professional if yer uncertain about yer future.

Sources

(1) https://www.gov.uk/student-finance/new-fulltime-students

(2) All images from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/759278/The_impact_of_undergraduate_degrees_on_early-career_earnings.pdf

Like this:

There has been a staggering 2000% increase in unconditional university offers awarded to students in the last five years, between 2013 to 2018.

In 2013, a mere 2985 students were awarded unconditional offers, compared to 61, 915 in 2018. To put this in percentage terms: in 2013 0.4 % of offers were unconditional, which rose to 7.1% of offers in 2018. This is all according to UCAS’ latest ‘end of cycle report‘.

Or to put it in its most ‘dramatic terms’ – that’s a nearly 2000% increase in unconditional offers in 5 years.

Why do universities make unconditional offers?

The obvious answer from a ‘psychological’ prospective is that an unconditional offer sends out a message to a student that the university ‘wants them’, that it ‘thinks favourably of them’, basically that it ‘likes them’, which makes that university more appealing to the student.

My love for you is unconditional, like this university offer….

According to the Vice Chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University, they use unconditional offers to attract high caliber students, which is going to be an advantage in a competitive market place, improving results and the calibre of graduate job the students get, which is all good for surviving in a competitive education market.

Universities are also using unconditional offers more crudely, to get ‘bums on seats’ in order to expand. The immediate policy impetus for this was the removal of the cap on the number of students each university could take on.

Driving this sort ‘unconditional expansion’ is again the market driven education system – in which you either expand or die. More bums on seats = more profit = more investment to attract more students. It’s just crude survival of the fittest in this crudest of systems.

70% of students support universities giving out unconditional offers, citing the reduction in stress and increase in mental health benefits that this certainty brings.

Ironically, this means that while our marketized education system induces more pressure and stress through-out school life generally, ironically it’s created a ‘stress free’ window for those students who get unconditional offers in their final year 13.

Or to put it more bluntly, those students who ‘have to pass their A-levels’ to get into the university of their choice are 10% more likely to do so than those who have just been gifted a place.

As an A-level teacher, I can testify that this is more than a bit crap when you are judged on your results… it means 7% of your students more likely to underachieve and there is literally nothing you can do can to motivate some of them. Unconditional offers undermines the ability of 16-19 teachers to meet the targets they are judged by. This is thus dysfunctional.

Underachieving at A-level might also come back to disadvantage students when they apply for jobs. Employers do look at A-level grades after all, and CCC is going to look a bit slack compared to a 2.1. It sends out the message that a students switches off when they can, rather than always giving their all. And if there’s more than one candidate or more for a job, the chances are they’ll be someone else in the field with a 2.1 and BBB (or whatever their target grades were at A-level).

It’s also extremely unfair… seven percent of students with a stress-free ride, compared to the rest of students having to achieve. It’s just not equitable.

An upside: widening participation?

The UCAS report does show that higher attaining students are most likely to be required to get their grades, which unconditional offers mainly going to mid-range students, and in terms of subjects, medicine hardly gives out any unconditional offers, whereas it’s the creative arts which give out the most.

This does suggest that unconditional offers are being used to widen participation, however, I’d need to see how this relates to retention to make a judgement as to how effective this is.

Final thoughts – should we ban unconditional offers?

If students are required to get grades at the end of 13, then I say yes, simply on the basis of equity. It’s not fair subjecting most students to the stress of having to achieve and a significant minority to an easier ride.

Also, I don’t see how scrapping unconditional offers is going to prevent universities expanding, or from managing their future intake: scrapping unconditional offers would only delay knowing the intake for the next year by 10 months, which is not that long in the grand scheme of things, and there’s plenty of other indicators universities could use in this big data era to forecast realistic numbers with sufficient certainty.

Sources

https://www.ucas.com/file/196151/download?token=jzRAy4kS (image 1, and the link to the UCAS report)

This is one possible example of a 10 mark ‘with item’ question which could come up in the AQA’s A level sociology paper 2: topics in sociology (section B: beliefs in society option).

Read the item, and then answer the question below.

Item

Karl Marx famously argued that religion was the ‘opium of the masses’ and Simone de Beauvoir argued that religion compensated women for their second class status. Both theorists believed that religion was an ideological tool which pacified the oppressed.

These views have, however, been criticized:

Applying material from the item, analyse two criticisms of the view that religion is merely a tool of oppression (10)

Firstly, Marxist and Feminist views tend to downplay the positive functions of religion.

As Functionalists have pointed out, it is quite likely that some form of religious belief and organisation is functional (i.e. beneficial for the individual and society) given that religion is practically universal (i.e found in nearly all societies).

Functionalists have pointed to many positive functions of religion – such as helping people deal with death and societies deal with transition and times of uncertainty. Rather than this being about simply keeping inequality in place, it could be that religion benefits everyone by keeping society stable.

Furthermore, people still practiced religion in secret in communist countries when religion was banned, suggesting that they actively wanted religion for their own comfort, rather than it simply being something forced on them by elites.

You could argue that a similar thing is found with religion today in the form of ‘civil religion’ – where people find comfort in quasi-religious ceremonies such as Football matches and Royal Weddings… again this seems to be a matter of choice, and because attendance is optional, it’s hard to argue that these ‘shallower’ forms of religion have a sinister social control function like Marxists and Feminists suggest!

Secondly, The above theories assume that people simply passively accept an elitist interpretation of religious doctrines. There is plenty of evidence that this is not always the case.

Liberation theology is a good example of this: where Catholic Church leaders in Latin America took the side of the landless peasants, and argued against the elitist interpretation that inequality was God’s will: instead helping the poor fight back against inequality and elite institutions and attempting to bring about a more equal society.

This is supporting evidence for the Neo-Marxist view that religion is not simply controlled by elites, but is relatively autonomous, thus meaning it can be a tool for social change.

From an Islamic Feminist point of view, Nawal el Sadawi argued that Islam was not inherently patriarchal, but rather that it had been interpreted in a patriarchal way in patriarchal societies (patriarchy comes first, if you like!). She further argued that it was perfectly possible for women to challenge Patriarchal interpretations of Islam, as she herself did, thus meaning it doesn’t have to be a tool of social control and pacification.

A postmodern analysis of religion further supports the ‘active intepretation’ criticisms of Marxism and Feminism – today people are much more likely to pick and mix their religious beliefs, and reject anything they don’t like, and use religion at selected times when they find it useful. This is hardly religion controlling and pacifying the population!

This is one possible example of a 10 mark ‘with item’ question which could come up in the AQA’s A level sociology paper 2: topics in sociology (section B: beliefs in society option).

Read the item, and then answer the question below.

Item

Feminists have criticized many traditional religions such as Christianity and Islam for being patriarchal: positions of power within the traditional institutions of both religions are largely controlled by men, an both tend to support traditional roles for men and women.

Feminists have also suggested that the New Age Movement appeals much more to women because it celebrates many aspects of femininity that traditional institutions seek to repress.

Applying material from the item, analyse two reasons for gender differences in the membership of religious organisations (10)

Suggested answer

Simone de Beauvoir suggested that Christianity offered women spiritual compensation for accepting their inferior roles in society as housewives and mothers.

However, now that more women are in work, and they place less emphasis on the importance of such traditional gender roles, there is less need for such spiritual compensation, hence why the numbers of women attending church may be declining.

Middle class women especially may find the New Age Movement appealing because it allows them to ‘shop’ for their particular therapy, and demands very low levels of commitment.

the NAM is also less focused on social roles, and allows women (and men) a much greater degree of freedom to express their feminine sides – it celebrates nurturing and caring and emotion in a much more ‘fun’ way than traditional churches tend to, which again might appeal to postmodern women more.

It is also more accepting of diversity and thus much less likely to look down on women who are divorced.

Secondly, traditional religious organisations tend to encourage the repression of female sexuality: Catholicism for example is anti-abortion and anti-contraception.

This does not fit in age of female sexual liberation and greater sexual promiscuity. Since the contraception and the pill (what Giddens calls ‘plastic sexuality’), which may explain why women are turning away from the church.

In contrast, the New Age Movement actually celebrates female sexuality. This may also explain why men don’t feel that attracted the the NAM, maybe they are threatened by empowered women, reflecting a crisis of masculinity.

Finally, the New Age Movement, in its pick and mix approach and celebration of diversity, is more likely to appeal to gender diverse individuals, as it is not against homosexuality like more traditional religions tend to be.

Useful links to quantitative and qualitative research studies, statistics, researchers, and news paper articles relevant to gender and education. These links should be of interest to students studying A-level and degree level sociology, as well as anyone with a general interest in the relationship between gender, gender identity, differential educational achievement and differences in subject choice.

Just a few links to kick-start things for now, to be updated gradually over time…

General ‘Hub’ Qualitative resources

A link to Professor Becky Francis’ research, which focuses mainly on gender differences in educational achievement – at time of writing (November 2017) her main focus seems to be on girls lack of access to science and banding and streaming (the later not necessarily gender focused)

Education as a strategy for international development – despite the fact that girls are outperforming boys in the United Kingdom and most other developed countries, globally girls are underachieving compared to boys in most countries. This link takes you to a general post on education and social development, many of the links explore gender inequality in education.

Specific resources for exploring gender and subject choice

Dolls are for Girls, Lego is for Boys – A Guardian article which summarizes a study by Becky Francis’s on Gender, Toys and Learning, Francis asked the parents of more than 60 three- to five-year-olds what they perceived to be their child’s favourite toy and found that while parental choices for boys were characterised by toys that involved action, construction and machinery, there was a tendency to steer girls towards dolls and perceived “feminine” interests, such as hairdressing.

Girls are Logging Off – A BBC article which briefly alerts our attention to the small number of girls opting to do computer science.

Mainstream secondary schools are increasingly engaging in the process of ‘off-rolling’ students between year 10 and sitting their GCSEs, according to a recent OFSTED report:

In 2017, a total of 19 000 students left a school between year 10 and sitting their GCSEs in 2011. This is 10% more than in the previous year.

A total of 2,900 schools offrolled at least one pupil between years 10 and 11,

560 schools had numbers which were significantly above what Ofsted would expect

300 schools had significantly higher offrolling numbers for two consecutive years.

What are the characteristics of off-rolling schools and off-rolled students?

Children with special educational needs, looked after children and some minority ethnic groups are more likely to leave their school.

A higher proportion of schools in London off-roll pupils compared to other parts of the country

Academies, particularly those in academy trusts off-roll more pupils than local authority schools.

What happens to off-rolled students?

Half of them go to other schools – either from LEA to LEA schools or from an Academy to an LEA school (but less likely in the other direction!), and I imagine some will go to Pupil Referral Units.

Half of off-rolled students in 2017 did not reappear in the census of another state school, and according to Jason Bradbury, Ofsted’s deputy director for data and insight, these pupils may now be attending an unregistered school or have dropped out of education entirely.

Of course some of these pupils will be being homeschooled, although TBH it’s probably more a case of their being ‘homeschooled’.

Links to A-level sociology

Bit busy today to thrash out the links, but there seems to be evidence of mainly academies doing this to game the results: getting rid of students most likely to fail, and so this appears to be an obvious unintended negative consequence of marketisation!

Answers to the AQA’s A-level sociology (7192/2) ‘topics’ exam: global development section B only. Just a few thoughts to put students out of their misery. (Ideas my own, not endorsed by the AQA)

I won’t produce the exact questions below, mainly because I haven’t actually seen the paper at time of writing, just the gist…based on what some of the students said immediately afterwards. Check back tomorrow for the updated, more precise version!

So NB – the actual questions may have been slightly different!

Q04: Outline and explain two ways in which development aid might promote gender equality (10)

I would have gone for two very basic ‘topic based’ areas to start: something about aid and improving women’s health and the knock on effects, and then something about women’s education, linked to work.

Q05: Analyse two things to do with cultural globalisation.

Obviously I need to see the item to comment fully, but I’m going to assume that the item allows you to develop one point using optimism versus pessimism and then another contrasting transformationalism with traditionalism.